Today has been interesting to say the least. Lots of people (a capacity audience) talking about all kinds of different issues surrounding e-learning and e-portfolios.

I’m very interested in topic maps, which have come up several times; the trick is going to be creating a friendly user interface for them. This kind of thing – you’re basically asking a user to create directional graphs – is necessarily complicated, but they need to be streamlined down as far as possible. They’re not going to be useful if they scare people off.

There was also a lot of talk about aggregating from all kinds of disparate sources where a user might have created content in order to draw everything together as a true portfolio. I think this is definitely the way to go, and has been a part of the learning landscape vision from the start; Dave is going to underline that tomorrow during his presentation. I’m looking forward to it.

From a personal perspective, the presentation from France Telecom R&D explaining how they’re using Elgg to experiment with new methods for facilitating knowledge management was very interesting indeed. One of the wonderful things about open source is seeing people take your tools, modifying them and harnessing them for new purposes.

Meanwhile, it’s been great to meet up with Misja Hoebe. The three of us outlined some ideas for the future development of the system that I’m very excited about. On top of that, he’s a really nice guy, and I’ve enjoyed hanging out during the conference.